bridgerj's comments

This sounds apocryphal. If setting the date forward triggered a maintenance warning, it sounds like the date system was working correctly.

More importantly, lift systems are not sensitive to long duration dates. They do not need to be.

This story reflects one of the myths that emerged from the media. Around 1997 they started discovering the topic of embedded systems and that many devices, including lifts, contained "computers." Not understanding the restricted and specialized nature of embedded systems, they then claimed all these systems were vulnerable to Y2K, and that the whole world was about to crash.

Most embedded systems, in lifts and other devices, had been designed in the 1990s. If they used dates, they did not use mistakes from the 1960s.

I think a more accurate way of describing the Indian engagement is that a lot of recruiters and Indian firms discovered there was very little vetting of candidates, and that almost anyone could be put forward and start earning money for the recruiter or offshorer.

It was money for jam.

What you're saying here is that there was no crisis.

The fact that people worked on date issues for a decade does not mean the public scare campaign in the late 90s was justified.

You could equally claim airplanes would crash if they weren't refuelled, or people would die if garbage wasn't collected. In those cases, the media is educated enough to know the claims are pointless.

In the case of y2k, they had little understanding of how enterprise IT worked, and lots of businesses who were happy to encourage that ignorance.

There are really a couple of issues in this topic. First, was there a potential problem due to dates? Second, was the massive scare campaign justified?

The answer to the first question is yes. There was a potential problem. However the companies and government departments that were affected had started planning in the early 90s, and they prepared during the decade. Many took the opportunity to embark on huge system upgrades. It was just one of many issues CIOs dealt with.

The answer to the second question is no. The huge disaster scares were not justified. Banks, airlines, insurance companies and government departments had already fixed their systems, just like they fix other problems.

What happened was that consulting companies, outsourcers and law firms suddenly realized there was a huge new market that they could scare into being. They started running campaigns aimed at getting work from mid size businesses.

The campaign took off because it was an easy issue for the media and politicians to understand. It also played into the popular meme that programmers were stupid. The kicker was the threat that directors who failed to prepare could be sued if anything went wrong. Directors fell into line and commissioned a lot of needless work.

In summary, there was the professional work carried out by big banks, airlines etc, generally between 1990 and 1997, and the panic-driven, sometimes pointless work by smaller firms in 1998 and 1999.